Fox News expert denies he claimed birth certificate legit

NEW YORK – The computer graphics expert Fox News relied upon to claim the birth certificate the White House released April 27 was legitimate insists that the network must retract the story, claiming it deliberately misquoted him and continues to ignore his repeated requests.

Jean Claude Tremblay told WND that none of his comments would permit the conclusion that the Obama birth certificate is an authentic document.

“I no longer trust Fox News,” he said, expressing anger verging on disdain for the way he feels the network treated him. “Despite my protests, Fox News will not allow me to correct their story.”

Noting that Obama doubters were claiming the birth certificate was a fake, Winter wrote, “But a leading software expert says there’s no doubt about its authenticity, and he dismisses claims of fraud as flat-out wrong.”

“I never said that,” Tremblay insists. “Winter called me and talked to me for about five minutes on the telephone, and she never said she was going to quote me. Then she misrepresented what I said.”

He asserted that the way Winter interpreted his comments about the use of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software in the PDF (Portable Document Format) file of the Obama birth certificate released by the White House “were also not 100 percent accurate.”

In his written comments, Tremblay expressed his consternation.

“First, I never thought that what I saw in the Birth Certificate PDF was a proof of its authenticity,” he wrote. “For me, what I have seen does not prove that it is legit, nor that it is a fake, nor that there has been any tampering whatsoever,” he wrote. “The title of the blog does not represent my conclusion. It would be unprofessional and simplistic within my area of competence to come to a conclusion one way or the other.”

Despite making repeated requests to Fox News to post a correction, including several comments to Winter on Twitter, Fox News has continued to leave its original story posted without any corrections or qualifications.

Winter did not respond to a WND call asking for comment.

“As far as I am concerned, Fox News is not trustworthy,” Tremblay said. “I would not watch Fox News or read the Fox News [website] because they have never replied to me or allowed me to post my corrections to their report of my comments and views.”

In the technical note Tremblay wrote on his website, he explained, “In my humble opinion, what I see about how the PDF is built does not prove any falsification. If there was tampering, we must look elsewhere and not how the PDF was created.”

“I have no idea why the White House would provide a scan of a document that had been run through OCR software,” he said, “and I’m not an expert on the image modification or typography arguments other experts have made.”

Specifically regarding Vogt and Irey, Tremblay said, “I have no explanation why some of the text in the document may have been changed and why other parts of the text may not have been changed.”

Tremblay also objected to a WND story that a comment he made on Amazon.com suggested he was an Obama supporter.

On May 1, WND reported that Tremblay posted on Amazon.com a review of a book by Rahaf Harfoush entitled “Yes We Did: An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand.”

Tremblay told WND that he had never worked for the Obama administration and he was only commenting on Harfoush’s book because he was impressed with the use of social media in politics.

“I’m not a detective specializing in the forgery of electronic documents,” he wrote on his professional website. “I am an instructor in graphic design software working to help people work faster, better and smarter.”

He insisted he was a Canadian who had no interest one way or the other in whether the Obama birth certificate is a forgery or an authentic document.

In the interview with WND, Tremblay repeatedly expressed irritation with having become involved in the Obama birth certificate story.

Before agreeing to speak with WND on the telephone, Tremblay had twittered WND that he would not return WND’s phone call.

“I had enough of this Obama story,” he twittered WND, recommending instead that WND rely upon the written comments he had posted on his website.